A view from today's train wreck of a commission hearing with Anderson Silva

Anthony Marnell of the Nevada State Athletic Commission about summed up the mood when he brought his head to rest on a table in mock exasperation before former middleweight champion Anderson Silva.

For the umpteenth time since Silva’s hearing into allegations of performance-enhancing drug use at UFC 183 began, a conference call speaker had butted into the proceedings, providing a comedic soundtrack to a defense that went downhill almost from the moment it started.

Even by MMA standards, it was a bizarre hearing that ended with Silva (33-6 MMA, 16-2 UFC) suspended for one year and fined $380,000 in addition to the overturning of his UFC 183 win over Nick Diaz (26-9 MMA, 7-6 UFC), a triumph after his improbable comeback from a broken leg suffered in a rematch with champ Chris Weidman a year earlier.

This time, the unknown DJ queued up Salt-N-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex” as Silva, 40, tried to explain how he had got ahold of a blue vial of liquid from a guy in Thailand. It contained a sexual enhancer, but unlike seven supplements he had used prior to fighting Diaz on Jan. 31 at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand Garden Arena, it had come back positive for the steroid drostanolone, or so his attorney-hired expert claimed.

The expert, Paul Scott, who two months earlier testified before the California State Athletic Commission on behalf of accused PED user Alexander Shlemenko, had not brought his findings to the hearing because, he said, he wasn’t asked. He later admitted he been disqualified as an expert in an anti-doping case by a New York City police commissioner who said he wasn’t qualified to talk about performance-enhancer clenbuterol.

As Silva explained, this liquid in the blue vial was more affective than Cialis, meaning, it wasn’t the kind of thing he would get from a doctor, and it definitely wasn’t something he would disclose to an athletic commission, which held his professional career in the balance after a trio of positive drug tests revealed four banned substances in his system.

“I didn’t disclose I was taking the Cialis because I didn’t think it would come up,” Silva said, via his longtime translator and manager Ed Soares, who early on in the fighter’s testimony clashed with the translator hired by the Nevada Attorney General’s Office, the wife of former UFC executive Mike Mersch. “Prior to other fights, whatever medications I took, I always disclosed, and I brought the medication to the show. I would be very uncomfortable looking at you and saying I’m taking Cialis prior the fight.”

Silva contemplatively rubbed his chin on a microphone during the hearing, adding more audio to the spectacle streamed live on UFC Fight Pass.

From the outset, the position of “The Spider” and his associates was that he never “willingly, knowingly or intentionally” taken anabolic steroids, though that position crumbled under the NSAC’s questioning.

Silva’s attorney, Nevada-based Michael Alonso, couldn’t answer why the PED androstane, in addition to drostanolone, had shown up in a Jan. 9 out-of-competition test. He flatly said “I don’t know” when NSAC chairman Francisco Aguilar questioned why drostanolone – a drug with a weeklong half-life, according to the attorney general’s expert at the WADA-accredited lab that popped Silva for PEDs – had shown up in Silva’s pre- and post-fight tests when the 40-year-old fighter claimed to stop using the supercharged sexual enhancer on Jan. 8.

All Silva and his camp would admit was that he took the substance to enhance his sexual performance and took anti-anxiety medication – for sciatic nerve pain he reportedly suffered this past November – the night prior to the fight. That was where it ended.

“Even though statute is strict liability there has to be room that if somebody is taking something and it’s contaminated, that has to be taken into consideration,” Alonso said.

But after hearing the story of how Silva’s supplements were tested, in an unlabeled vial that had to be broken to be accessed, Marnell seemingly couldn’t help himself. He called Silva’s defense “hokey.”

Deliberations began swiftly after a plea for leniency from Alonso, who seemed to sense early that the fight had been lost. While Silva escaped the enhanced punishments recently adopted by the NSAC in response to his and a spate of other high-profile cases, it was clear he wouldn’t get off easy.

After trying again to get to the bottom of why the fighter often described as the greatest of all time had chosen to endanger his legacy in such a haphazard way, Marnell tried to offer some consolation to the ex-champ.

“I think he’s done excellent things, but this is the first time he’s really been subject to enhanced testing,” he said. “We’re just playing games. And that’s my frustration at all this soft testimony.”

“We have a great DJ by the way,” he added as the unknown DJ piped up on once again on the conference-call feed and was eventually muted.

Since Silva has already served the majority of the one-year sentence quickly handed down by the NSAC, he’ll be eligible to apply for another license in February 2016. He’ll need to provide a clean drug test and pay all or a portion of the $380,000 in fines and court fees.

But to the MMA community that watched him today, he lost perhaps the best chance to explain himself.

For complete coverage of UFC 183, check out the UFC Events section of the site.